Unlike a human, even the best designed robot may fail when it faces a problem it wasn't specifically designed to solve. This is known as brittleness and AI researchers consider it one of the most challenging problems of AI. Michael L. Anderson and Donald R. Perlis have released a new paper, titled "Self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness" (PDF format), that poses a solution to the problem. The metacognitive loop is basically a process by which a machine can "notice something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place".